The Biological Integration System

摘要

The access and exploitation of integrated Web data repositories and applications is critical for life science. Biologists design protocols that typically rely on complex query pipelines accessing various biological Web resources (data sources and tools) to constitute data sets for analysis and mining. Web integration platforms are needed to allow biologists to access, manipulate and analyze electronic biological data. The design of integration architectures to support life science addresses specific issues. Biological resources are highly heterogeneous: not only they differ by their data representation, but they also offer radically different query capabilities. In this paper we present the Biological Integration System (BIS) that focuses on the data integration aspects while addressing the integration of query capabilities available at the sources. Typically, biological Web data sources provide complex query and analysis capabilities such as sequence similarity search engines, that need to be integrated as well as the data. We introduce the notion of derived wrappers that capture additional query capabilities to either compensate capabilities lacking at a source, or to adjust an existing capability in order to make it homogeneous with similar capabilities, wrapped at other sources.